Decrescendo
by How Like a Winter
Summary: “Did Alex ask about me?” “No.” Five snapshots of the decline in Ben and Alex's relationship. Oneshot.


_Decrescendo_

Another pregnant woman had died that day, and Ben walked home with his head bowed, running over the scenario again and again. They'd surrounded her with doctors, followed every precaution, and yet learned nothing from her inexplicable death. For someone who supposedly had answers for at least some of the Island's many mysteries, he had absolutely no idea as to what they could possibly—

"Daddy!" A smile tugged at his grave expression as the little girl, barely four, greeted him with open arms. The nanny smiled too, and handed the toddler she held over to her father. He bounced her a few times, and she laughed, a sound he never forgot. When he had paid the nanny, and she left, he set Alex down and she ran on wobbly legs to fetch the blocks that she so loved to stack up and knock over.

When she thrust a few at him, he said, "You want me to build something?" Clapping her hands, she squealed when he set one on top of the other, and he couldn't stop grinning at her bright eyes and face lit with a pure, innocent joy that he had not known as a child, but Alex had made him more than familiar with.

* * *

"I'll be seeing you,_ boy_."

Charles Widmore had warned Ben several times over the years that if the island truly desired Alex's death, she would die, and he was helpless to stop it. Before his banishment, Widmore repeated the threat again. While Ben dismissed the notion in front of Widmore, his stomach turned considering the loss of the precious little girl, barely old enough to attend school, awaiting him on the swing.

Seeing him, she cried, "Daddy!", the familiar expression of delight at his return. Richard, who had accompanied Ben to Widmore's departure, lingered for a moment and watched. When Ben pushed her on the swing, her excitement growing the higher she reached, thoughts of Widmore and the surely-empty threats faded away as Ben marveled at the unconditional love radiating from the young girl. The decision to defy Widmore's orders and keep her had startled even himself at the time, but not one day afterward had Ben regretted the decision.

Suddenly he snapped back in the moment and raced to where his daughter lay on the ground. "Are you hurt?" he demanded, forehead creased with concern as he grasped her shoulder.

Lifting her head up, she giggled. "No, Daddy, I jumped off! It's fun!"

"Well, you might want to work on that landing, or you really could get hurt."

"Okay." She hopped to her feet and skipped back over to the swing. "Push me again?"

He glanced at Richard and smiled nervously, relieved and only slightly embarrassed for worrying so.

* * *

_Can't you please just let me go home?_ begged Juliet, hugging herself tightly with both arms. Without meeting her eyes, Ben said _no_, wondering what else she could possibly expect him to say. At a loss for words, she wept harder, and he chose that moment to disappear into the living room before she could collect herself. Alex didn't need to hear any more shouting, any more crashes like the glass Juliet had knocked to the floor.

Alex. Yes, that's it, he thought, pacing back and forth across the floor. Juliet's sobs echoed down the hallway, and as he gritted his teeth, unable to listen for one more second, he stormed out of the house and just barely remembered not to slam the door behind him lest his daughter hear it.

Outside, the fourteen-year-old sat cross-legged against the wall of the house, her hand poised on the right corner of a book. Approaching her, Ben realized that Alex was reading _Carrie_. The side of his mouth twitched in a half-smile and he knelt in the grass beside her, hoping for a distraction from the dismal situation in the house. " You've been keeping up with the book club?" he said, eyebrows raised in slight surprise.

With a shrug, she replied, "Stephen King's okay."

"That's what Juliet says. I don't care much for _Carrie_, though." When she offered no reply, he asked, "What about it interests you?"

She just shrugged again and continued reading. For a long moment Ben glanced around, wondering what had made the little chatterbox so dismissive, but he saw only the grass drifting back and forth and heard only the mutterings of Others passing one another in the distance.

"Is something wrong?"

Turning a page, slowly and deliberately, she shook her head.

Sighing, he nearly stood up to leave, but the thought occurred to him that he could go nowhere else but back inside in the house he had just escaped. If he could resolve whatever troubled Alex, at least, Juliet's despair would pale in comparison to that small victory. "Are you certain, Alex?"

Slamming the book shut, she finally looked up at him and said, "You and Juliet, that's what's wrong."

Taken aback, he stammered, "I-I don't know what you are talking about."

"Don't pretend it didn't happen," she snapped. "So she just broke that glass on accident? Maybe she's just crying because she didn't mean to drop it, is that it? I heard every word, _Ben_." She spat the name like one would spit out a drink after learning of its poison.

Narrowing his eyes, he said, "Do not call me that again, Alex. You didn't hear everything. You don't know—"

"I know enough! I know you force her to stay even though she can't stand being here, and she can't stand you either." Her voice rose in volume with every word, and Ben desperately put a finger in front of his lips in an effort to keep any nearby Others from hearing Alex's fierce accusations.

"Don't talk like that. You don't know anything about Juliet and I," he said coldly.

"I know you make her cry every single day because she can't get away from you." Now, Alex's strained voice betrayed her mask of anger to reveal that she bordered on tears. "You act like you own her or something."

Ben opened his mouth to reply—and later wondered if he would have really said the bitter words that instinctively rose to mind—but a curious rumbling noise halted his furious retort. His brow furrowed in thought as he tried to remember something, and finally he asked, "Alex, when did you last eat?" Just where had she run off too during those meals, and how had he not noticed her absence? He cursed how his obsession with keeping Juliet on the Island had encompassed so much of his concern that he had totally forgotten, over the past few days, to keep an eye on his daughter.

"I don't know." She brought her legs up against her body and hugged them to her body, a motion all too reminiscent of how Juliet held herself with her arms. "Like you even care."

"Well of course I care, Alex, I'm your father—"

"You 'care' about Juliet too, and look how miserable you make her. Just leave me alone."

Ben looked at her with wide blue eyes until, doubting his ability to reply without damaging their relationship beyond repair, he stood up and walked away. _She's only fourteen_, he told himself. _At that age, kids say things they don't mean. _But even so, the laughing little girl withdrew more every passing day. He could hardly envision the time when such a girl could have existed, or for that matter, when exactly she slipped out of his fingers.

* * *

Setting his jaw, Ben steeled himself for Alex's reaction when he entered her room. These days, a simple request or question would set her off, and as much he wanted to keep her involved with he and Juliet, she provoked arguments at every chance and during every meal he insisted she appear at. So, finally relenting in favor of a peaceful dinner, he rapped his knuckles on her door and prepared to tell her that Juliet would be bringing it up to her room in a half hour or so. Mostly, though, he also just wanted to check that she remained in her room and hadn't run off anywhere.

When no reply came, he called, "Open the door, Alex," knowing that to even touch the doorknob served no purpose. However, after another silence, he jerked on it anyway and swore under his breath when it refused to budge. But he had a lock pick, just for these occasions; jamming it into the slot he twisted until the door swung open.

He fully expected to find an empty room, so his eyes widened as he gazed at his daughter sitting at the opposite end of the bedroom and cradling another Stephen King novel. "Care to tell me why you couldn't be bothered to answer?" _I wouldn't have even had to enter, I only came to say a simple thing and make sure she was here, and she's found a way to complicate it._ She only shrugged in reply, the motion that made his blood boil because she never reacted any other way these days, besides declaring her hatred for him or yelling over some insignificant issue.

Refusing to take the bait, he said, "Juliet will be up with your dinner in a little while, so don't inconvenience yourself by coming down." He turned to leave, hoping that nothing else need be said.

"Oh, so I'm banished from the table now?"

In a slow, careful voice, he said, "I would think that to eat in your room is what you would have wanted, Alex, considering that you make even eating a meal impossible these days without inflaming some petty disagreement."

"Is that what you thought, Ben?"

Unable to swallow the anger that crept into his voice, he snapped, "It isn't as if you emerge at any other time of the day."

"It isn't as if there's anything else to do in this shithole."

Gripping the side of the door so hard that his knuckles whitened, he said, "You are never to use such language with your own father, Alex."

She glared at him definitely and demanded, "Or what, you'll lock my boyfriend away in a cage? Oh wait, you already did. Just get out of my room!"

"Wherever did you get the idea that you can order me around like that?"

Eyes brimming with tears, Alex demanded, "How is it any different from the way you treat Juliet?"

Ben stared at his daughter, speechless.

* * *

"Juliet." When she turned to face where he lay on the operating table, he said, "Did Alex ask about me?"

"No."

He responded to whatever she said after that, and of course he_ heard_ the rest of her sentence, but he'd long stopped listening. Like a broken record, the phrase Alex had spoken to him only a few days earlier replayed over and over in his mind: _I don't care what happens to you_.

Most of her words were no more than automatically resentful for no other apparent reason than the mere sake of it, but she had proven to mean every word she had spoken when Ben had revealed to her the news of his spinal tumor.

How far they had come: from his laughing little girl on the swing, to the day he had been so indignant at her just calling him by his first name, to the point where, whether he lived or died, it made no difference to her at all.

**AN**: _First draft, so suggestions are more than welcome! I did my best to keep with the timeline of LOST—Alex should have been thirteen or fourteen at the time of Juliet's first year on the island, and I've often wondered what Alex thought about Ben's treatment of Juliet and how it affected their relationship._


End file.
